Friday Recap: Special World Edition

Wow! What a week! SMX Advanced was intense. I learned a lot and made deeper personal relationships, and I wasn’t even there! It’s all thanks to the incredible liveblogging that I was honored to take part in. You can too — just head over to the earlier posts from this week (I’ve rounded them all up here and we share some additional liveblogging lessons here) by Susan and special guests Alan Bleiweiss, Dana Lookadoo, and Gil Reich.

Those who attended Bruce’s SEO training workshop yesterday found it to be a strong way to close out the show. Exhibit A was one attendee’s Twitter sentiment, which Paula shared in the writers’ room chat. I’ll let you into our special world for a moment:

[10:50:38 AM] BCI-Paula Allen:http://twitter.com/samturri/status/15866347656[11:01:12 AM] BCI-Virginia Nussey: yay! super tweet![3:54:49 PM] BCI-Virginia Nussey: http://www.theawl.com/2010/06/new-york-times-bans-the-word-tweet[3:56:24 PM] BCI-Virginia Nussey: so my above message would read, “yay! super Twitter update!”[3:57:11 PM] BCI-Paula Allen: Excellent Skype reply![3:57:51 PM] BCI-Susan Esparza: What do they do when they’re talking about the interface? “Then you press the Twitter update button”?[3:58:26 PM] BCI-Susan Esparza: Then people will be “What’s the Twitter update button? I don’t see the Twitter update button.”[3:58:31 PM] BCI-Susan Esparza: “How will I study?”[3:58:49 PM] BCI-Paula Allen: You’ll read the NYT, naturally.[3:59:23 PM] BCI-Paula Allen: Ooo, now I want to write “tweet” and “tuchus” in the same sentence![4:00:12 PM] BCI-Paula Allen: And what’s the “invented past-tense”? Would I have had seen it?[4:00:32 PM] BCI-Susan Esparza: Look, in Real Media Establishments like the NYT, they do not sit on their tuchus and tweet all day long.

Man, we crack ourselves up!

Google announced that its souped up indexing infrastructure, Caffeine, was fully live. People were less impressed by a Google experiment meant to highlight the new ability for users to personalize the home page with an image. [Dear Google, just be Google. You don’t have to be Bing. —Susan]

This week we also saw the official unveiling of Apple’s iPhone 4, iOS 4, Safari 5 browser and iAd mobile ad program — am I missing anything. They’re very busy people over there.

A new Digital marketing conference was announced last week, hosted by the teams at Search & Social and 10e20. Search & Social publication Search Engine Journal held a contest this week with the winner receiving a pass and hotel room for the conference, BlueGlass LA, taking place July 19 and 20 in beautiful Marina Del Rey. The contest asked people to post a Twitter update on what outrageous thing they’d do for the prize. Let’s just say the winner’s a brave soul.

That contest was further proof that engagement’s the big goal in all this Digital marketing stuff we do. To generate some engagement on your Digital marketing site, there’s now an easy way to create a white label keyword tool widget that you can put anywhere: the Widget Generator. Thanks, WordStream!

Both Yahoo! and Bing announced big moves in the social space this week. Yahoo! announced an agreement with Facebook to share content from the social network on Yahoo! platforms. Bing announced their new social search vertical, which will aggregate updates from Twitter and Facebook and highlight trending real-time data from these services.

If you’re not in South Africa right now but are hyped for the World Cup, which kicked off today, there’s a rundown of all the ways you can make the most out of the media, including websites, mobile apps and radio/podcast coverage. And if you’re not interested in the sport itself, your inner scientist may be interested to know that there’s quite a controversy going on about the fancy new soccer ball that’s being used. The new ball is almost perfectly round, uses wind channeling technology and has a more friction-y texture. It appears to twist and turn unexpectedly mid-flight.

And finally, the most important news of the week — drum roll please…The competition stage of “So You Think You Can Dance” has just begun and Susan wants you on Team Robert. [He’s a hometown boy and my massage therapist’s son! Plus he has cute floppy hair! What’s not to love? —Susan] Aren’t you glad you stopped by today? :)

About the Author

Virginia Nussey is the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay, Inc. She joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger. Today she supports client service teams and produces and manages content for clients and Bruce Clay. Head over to her author page to connect on social.

Spreading love back to you, Virginia. I “in” for BlueGlass LA. See you there?

I’m relying on people like you to report recaps like this. I totally missed WordStream’s widget generator. As I’m in the process of developing my new site, this is a super cool find. (Dear WordStream, you are loved, too!)

P.S. to Ken. Virginia was at SMX only in spirit and busy fingers behind-the-scenes back at the office. Unfortunately, we were not graced by her presence due to her wrists. I don’t think she got much rest, however…

Bruce’s SEO Workshop was simply amazing. I didn’t think it was possible to captivate my attention for 8+ hours over the course of a long day, but Bruce made it happen. Totally worth the 90 minutes sleep I got on the red eye later that night!

Bruce is also an incredibly humble and gracious guy, posing for pictures with attendees and signing copies of his book. He stuck around for a good hour after his talk to answer follow-up questions and give helpful advice.

Looking forward to digging into the toolset and coming up with a list of “to do” items for my team.

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